The Salvation
by Tobias Flies Free
Summary: Rachel is given a second chance at life, but when Tobias is captured by Yeerk extremists, she needs to find a way to reunite the Animorphs to get him back.
1. Chapter 1: Tobias and Rachel

THE SALVATION

My name was Tobias.

But that was a long time ago, before the Blade Ship. Before Rachel... when Rachel was alive. I was a boy named Tobias, trapped in the body of a hawk.

Now I am a hawk, and Tobias is a memory.

As much as I want to abandon the boy I was, I can't get away from him. His name is carved into my tree, next to Rachel's. There's a heart around them. I swore to myself that I would never forget Rachel, and the consequence is that I can never abandon Tobias.

I still have her urn in my tree. It helps me sleep, somehow, leaning against it at night, when my memories threaten to surface and overwhelm me.

I will never return to the human world. Not after the disastrous mission in which we tried to rescue Ax. Only some creative meddling on behalf of the Ellimist, claiming his prize for winning the Yeerk/Andalite portion of his endless game with Crayak, got us out of that alive, and even then Sgt. Santorelli didn't return, sacrificing himself to rescue Ax from the collective body of The One.

None of the Animorphs have interacted since then. Jake was imprisoned to await military trial. Marco escaped to God-knows-what country to become a celebrity protected from US law. Ax was restored to his position in the Andalite fleet.

And Tobias returned to his meadow, then abandoned himself. Myself.

My name was Tobias.

But not anymore.

* * *

My name was Rachel.

My situation is a little different from Tobias's. I haven't tried to abandon myself to a morph or anything. I'm dead, you see. So while I'm still the same person, every part of my life is in the past tense. All I have now is my soul, hanging around the world, unable to affect it in any way. The most I've ever been able to do is comfort Tobias while he tries to sleep at night.

I don't know why my soul or spirit or whatever is still hanging around. It's not because I died unfulfilled – by the end of the war, I'd been consumed by the rage and the violence and the beauty of battle, and I couldn't imagine living for anything else. I saw my mother and sisters grieving at the funeral, and I knew my father would do the same, but I also knew they'd get over it. They had other things in their lives.

But Tobias... I was really all Tobias had. _He_ was something to live for, I had realized. And as I watched him suffer, I wanted to live again. I longed to hold him, to reassure him, to let him know everything would be okay.

**Rachel.**

I looked around wildly. Stupid, of course, it had to be some all-powerful being like the Ellimist or Crayak to speak like that.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

**Think of me as... the impartial observer. I preside over the matches between Crayak and Ellimist, and judge the winner. I also seed the initial conditions specified by the two.**

"So why are you here?" I demanded. "This match is over."

**I retain the right to interfere however I wish after the matches have ended. And I have taken a liking to you and your friend in the tree**.

I thought I saw where this was headed, but I didn't dare hope. There was no way he'd be allowed to do such a thing. No way.

**There are... limits to what I can do. If you were to suddenly return from the dead, there would be problems. I caused quite a stir the last time I interfered that way.**

I glared at the empty air. "Then what the hell are you here for?"

**There is one loose end left over from the match. Do you recall a girl named Melissa Chapman?**

My blood ran cold. Well, not my blood. You know what I mean. "What about Melissa?" I asked, forcing my voice to keep from shaking.

**She was caught in the destruction of your hometown, but not killed. She has been brain-dead in a hospital ever since the end of the war.**

"No..." My fists clenched. We may have grown apart, but for most of my life I'd loved that girl like a sister.

**Her mother died in the blast, and her father died several years after the war. Suicide. She has no other family.**

**Melissa's heart still beats, but she is dead. There is no soul left. Therefore...**

"I can see where you're going with this," I cut him off, "and the answer is no. I will not take over her body for _any_ reason."

**But she is gone. Dead. Her body is only a shell – an empty home which desires an occupant.**

"If I do this, I'm no better than a goddamn Yeerk," I argued. "I'd rather watch Tobias suffer for the rest of his life than steal my best friend's body."

**There _is _a difference,** the Observer insisted. **You would not be depriving your friend of her freedom. That is the basic problem with the Yeerk parasitism, is it not? Here, maybe this will convince you...**

Melissa appeared before me. I turned my back on her. So this third party was a trickster just like the other two. No matter. I could ignore her as long as I needed.

"Rachel..." I heard her say. It certainly sounded like Melissa. _Of course it does_, I said to myself. _Wouldn't be a decent trick otherwise_.

"Rachel, listen," the Melissa behind me said. "I can't cut free of the earth, Rachel, not while I'm still tied to my body. It keeps trying to call me back. It'll only stop when it's filled by something, and Rachel, you're the only person I would trust like that." Couldn't let her see the tears in my eyes. Couldn't let that thing know it had gotten to me. "Please, Rachel. I want to be with my parents. It's been so long since they've been free."

I turned and swung at the apparition behind me, but it had vanished. "Fine! I'll do it! I'll do your goddamn body-snatch."

**I will require payment.**

"Name your price."

**I shall require the sacrifice of something you hold dear to you.**

I shook my head. "I won't give you Tobias."

**I would not ask for Tobias. I will let you know in due time what is required of you.**

"Fine." I couldn't think of anything else the Observer could possibly demand of me. "I agree."

**Let it be done.**

And the world went black.


	2. Chapter 2: Rachel

THE SALVATION

RACHEL

I awoke on a hard bed in a darkened hospital room that smelled like antiseptic, hooked up to machines that presumably monitored my – Melissa's, that is - heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals. Intravenous tubes supplied nutrients and liquids...

...and I had a tube in my throat.

I started gagging reflexively, over and over again. I could hear my heart rate spike on the monitor to my left. Two nurses rushed into the room. One of them held me down while another one jabbed me with a needle. A sedative, I guess, since my gagging stopped and my muscles began to relax.

A day later I was sitting up in the hospital bed and talking to the doctor about being discharged.

"Your recovery is, quite frankly, remarkable," he said. "We had never expected you to regain consciousness, but here you are, healthy as you were before you were admitted."

I smiled at the man. "I guess God just likes me or something," I said. "Will you need to do any follow-ups?"

"Standard practice says yes," the doctor replied. "Even though you seem to be fit as a fiddle, you should come back every few weeks or so just so that we can make sure there's nothing going on that we can't detect. It's completely up to you, though."

"I'll consider it," I said.

I was discharged the next day, and I walked out of the hospital with no intention of ever going back. Logic told me that an omnipotent being wouldn't screw up my resurrection, especially when he was going to get something out of the bargain.

Melissa had only had one set of clothes when she was admitted – the clothing she was wearing. The rest had been destroyed in the razing of our hometown by the Yeerks as a landing area for the Pool Ship. They had been cleaned and mended by the hospital staff, so I wasn't in dire need of shopping just yet, though the urge was tempting. I was in Santa Clarisa, about 130 miles from my old hometown, and the doctor had been kind enough to give me enough money to get back there on the bus and maybe get something to eat.

While I was on the bus, a thought struck me. I made my way into the bathroom at the back, locked the door, and stripped down to my underwear. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused on an image of a bald eagle.

After a few minutes of concentration, absolutely nothing had happened. I sighed and put my clothes back on. I guess it wasn't surprising that I couldn't morph – Melissa couldn't, after all – but I had hoped that this superhuman being would tweak reality a bit to give me my abilities. Oh well. So much for benevolence.

I gazed out of the bus window as we drove through my hometown a couple hours later. It was amazing how much had been rebuilt since the war. Here and there were still obviously unfinished neighborhoods, but for the most part it almost looked as though it had never been destroyed. When it came right down to it, humanity was amazing at recovering from disaster.

The bus pulled into a station across from a huge park. I disembarked and strolled across the street to try and get my bearings. I looked briefly at the sign near the entrance of the park and stopped in my tracks.

**_Rachel Berenson Memorial Park  
_**_Rachel Berenson gave her life fighting  
__alongside the Animorphs in the final battle  
__against the Yeerks. This park is dedicated  
__to her so that her name will endure for the  
__rest of history._

My eyes teared up and I felt a lump rising in my throat. They'd dedicated this entire park to me. I walked in, looking around. Trees, grass, flowers everywhere. A play area, covered with kids. Teenagers over at a skate area. Adults all over the place. This seemed to have become _the_ hangout area in town. All of these people, coming to this place named in my memory. My emotions threatened to overwhelm me, and I sat down on a bench, taking deep breaths. I couldn't lose it. I was in public. People would stare.

"Melissa?"

My head jerked instinctively towards the sound of my younger sister's voice. "Sara?" I spotted her skateboarding over to me from the skate area and my emotions threatened me even more. She was an adult now. How on earth had that happened? Had I really been gone so long?

She hopped off the skateboard and flipped it up into her hand. "Hi! I haven't seen you in _ages_! Where have you been?"

I cleared my throat, willing the lump to go away. "Oh, you know, around," I said casually. "I've been living up in Santa Clarisa since the war." I gestured. "This place is just so full of memories, you know?"

Sara's eyes clouded. "Yeah." She sat down next to me and draped her arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. It took all of my inner strength to keep from bursting into sobs right there and telling her who I was. _They've moved on_, I told myself sternly. Instead, I hugged her back.

"Hey," she said after we'd sat that way a while. "My mother's here. She'll want to see you, I bet."

I couldn't trust myself to see my mother just yet. One more assault on my emotions would just be too much. "I actually have some stuff to do," I said, rising from the bench. "You know what, though, give me your address and I'll come visit soon."

"That'd be nice." She smiled, then pulled a pen and scrap of paper out of her pocket and scrawled the address down for me.

"Thanks." I tucked the paper into my pocket and gave her another hug. "I'll see you around, okay?"

"Definitely," Sara replied. She hopped back on her skateboard and headed back towards the half-pipe.

I took a deep breath. First things first. I needed to go see Tobias now. I made my way out of the park and started the long walk out to Cassie's old farm.


	3. Chapter 3: Tobias

THE SALVATION

TOBIAS

My laser-sharp eyes scanned the meadow, looking for any hint of movement among the grass. Winter had come, and although the California winters were mild, food had been scarce for a couple of weeks. I hadn't managed to find anything to eat the previous day, so I was hoping I'd be able to fill my stomach today.

I spotted the moving stalk of grass just as the mouse emerged from its hole in the ground. It crept across the field towards the treeline while I waited... waited... When it was within ten feet of my tree I took off and dove towards it.

"Tobias?"

I hadn't heard a human voice in months, so the call completely threw me for a loop. I nearly smacked facefirst into the dirt, but I regained my composure and fluttered away from the ground. By the time I had control again, the mouse was long gone. So much for dinner.

"Tobias? Are you here?"

As I rose into the sky, I tried to figure out why the voice was so unsettlingly familiar.. I'd definitely heard it somewhere before, but I wasn't sure where. It had been long ago. Before I had been a hawk, maybe, or before I'd accepted my hawkhood. I steeled myself and dug into my memories.

"Tobias?" The voice sounded more distant now. It was the voice of... Melissa Chapman? Why would Melissa Chapman be coming to look for me? I had never actually known her. I remembered her voice from the time Rachel had morphed Melissa's cat to infiltrate Melissa's father's house, and I vaguely remembered the alternate timeline where she had taken Rachel's place in the Animorphs, but we had never actually interacted. I was suspicious, but not suspicious enough to leave. I drifted a bit lower so that I could see into the trees better.

"There you are!" Melissa was right below my tree. "Why didn't you answer me?"

I circled down and landed on my branch. ‹First of all, you just scared off my lunch, and I haven't eaten in days,› I said heatedly.

She winced. "Sorry. I didn't realize you were hunting."

‹Yeah, well, you still shouldn't go around shouting in the woods,› I said. ‹I'm not the only thing here. Anyway, why should I answer you? As far as I can remember, we've never actually _met_.›

Melissa slapped her forehead. "Sorry," she said. "I keep forgetting what I look like."

‹What the hell is that supposed to mean?› I demanded.

She took a deep breath. "I mean that I'm not actually Melissa Chapman." She looked up at me. "It's me, Tobias. Rachel."

For a second, I was frozen, unable to believe my ears. Recovering, I launched away from my tree, needing to get away from this monster who thought that claiming to be Rachel would be _funny_.

"Tobias, wait! Let me explain!"

I wheeled back and went into a dive, talons outstretched. Melissa shrieked and ducked, covering her head with her arm, and I shot over her head and back into the sky, powering away as fast as my wings would take me.

‹If you're really Rachel, morph and come after me!› I shouted back bitterly.

She didn't, of course, and I continued on my lonely way.

* * *

An hour later, the hawk mind was starting to get uneasy. Our meadow was far behind us, and the closer we got to the mountain, the less likely we were to find another one. I ignored it and kept flying. I couldn't go back to the old meadow, not now that Melissa knew the way. She would almost certainly be back, although I couldn't fathom what she got out of trying to convince me she was Rachel other than some sort of dark amusement.

_WHOOSH_. A white blur shot right past me, missing by a hair. I banked right and flapped to gain some height, trying to see what had attacked me.

The other bird wheeled around. _A peregrine falcon?_ I thought. That wasn't normal. Peregrines didn't normally try to take out hawks, or even hang out this far from the sea. Before I could try to figure out what was going on, though, it attacked again, and I was forced to barrel roll out of the way.

As it came after me, I dove into the trees, weaving around them in an attempt to lose my pursuit. I risked a glance behind me. No sign of the falcon. Narrowly missing a thick branch, I flew back towards the sky.

I didn't even see the shadow before it hit me from above.


	4. Chapter 4: Rachel

THE SALVATION

RACHEL

I waited for hours at the base of Tobias's tree, now and then tracing the heart that he'd carved into it so many years before. When he hadn't returned by sunset, I resigned myself to the fact that he'd probably gone to find a new meadow. Sighing, I began the trek back to civilization, cursing every time I accidentally walked through something thorny. It had been a long time since I'd walked between the farm and the meadow, and the path had long since become overgrown. It was hard to tell there had ever been a path there.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of walking, suffering, and wishing I'd approached Tobias differently, I reached Cassie's old house. After Cassie had gone off to work for the government, her parents sold the house and moved the rehabilitation clinic to a much larger farm about a half hour away so that they could expand. They'd hired a bunch of new staff and Walter had become one of _the_ go-to animal consultants in the county.

The people who had bought the house had planned to make a museum out of it, but so far they hadn't found any backers and no work had been done on the house. That meant I could spend the night without having to worry about being discovered.

I suppose I could've gone back to town and asked to stay in my family's house, but I didn't think I was ready to face them quite yet. I still hadn't decided if I'd ever tell them the truth about who I was, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep myself from just blurting it out in front of them. I needed time to adjust first.

I checked my watch. About nine. I was absolutely exhausted from the long walk, and emotionally drained by my failure to reach Tobias. I needed sleep badly. In a trance, I made my way to Cassie's bedroom and collapsed onto the bed.

The next morning, I awoke feeling refreshed. I made my way lazily into the kitchen and looked through all of the cabinets. No food at all, of course. Nobody had lived in this house for nearly ten years. Stomach rumbling, I wandered into the living room and flipped on the television. Apparently whoever had bought the farm was still paying the cable bills, because I could get pretty much any channels Cassie's family had always had. I flipped around, looking for something interesting to watch while I ate, until I hit a news report that made my heart skip. I turned the volume up.

"–still no new news regarding the kidnapped Animorph," the anchor was saying. "Experts are examining the footage as we speak, trying to determine whether the animal in the video actually matches a known morph of any of the local heroes."

Some footage from the Spielberg movie based on Marco's book started playing. The woman continued in a voice-over. "The Animorphs leapt back into the public eye a few years back when they stole a covert government spacecraft in order to rescue their Andalite comrade, Prince Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil, from the clutches of a being known only as The One. Little is known about their return."

The video returned to the anchor. "Prince Aximili has been informed of the kidnapping and has pledged to come to the aid of his former teammate as soon as he is allowed by his Andalite commanders. Here once again is the footage of the alleged Animorph in captivity."

A grainy, low-quality video began to play. A bunch of men and Hork-Bajir were lined up along a dirt wall while their leader, who claimed they were Controllers with the ability to morph, was ranting about how they would destroy the human race and restore the Yeerks to their former glory, starting by taking out all of the Animorphs in turn. When he finished his speech, the man gestured with his cane at a nearby box, which became transparent.

I gasped as the remote control fell from my slack fingers. Inside was a very familiar red-tailed hawk.

* * *

"No, I don't want to know the visiting hours for Hork-Bajir National Park," I snapped at the secretary over the phone. "I need to speak with the Hork-Bajir liaison."

After the news program, I'd grabbed all the cash in Cassie's old hiding place (loose floorboard under the bed, of course; Cassie could be incredibly predictable at times) and made my way into town as quickly as I could. At the library, I'd spent a productive afternoon learning as much as I could about what had happened to the Animorphs since my death. It seemed Cassie was the only person in a position to help me, so I looked up her number on the Department of the Interior's website and got to work trying to reach her on a cell phone I'd plucked from a badly watched purse.

"I'm sorry, but Mrs. Chambers doesn't take calls," the other woman insisted. "I can take a message for you and pass it on when I see her."

"You know what? Never mind." I flipped the phone shut and shoved it in my pocket, frustrated. Without Cassie, the vague plan I'd assembled in my mind fell right apart. My mind buzzing, I made my way over to McDonald's and got a salad to graze on.

Graze. How soon would Ax be back? Not soon enough, probably. I needed to act fast, or I was sure those Yeerk lunatics would kill Tobias. Talk about irony.

Suddenly, it hit me. If I couldn't get Cassie to talk to me, I'd have to go talk to her. But how could I get to Wyoming on such short notice? I only had about twenty bucks left, not even close to enough money for a plane ticket. Nevertheless, I made my way to the airport, hoping inspiration would strike on the way.

It didn't. Despondent, I wandered through the airport until I spotted a Bank of America branch. Bank of America... why was that nagging at me? If I'd had any savings accounts there, they'd have been closed when I died. Not that Melissa could access them anyway.

Wait. Melissa_ could_ access one account, if it was still active. On a whim, when we were younger, we pooled all of our birthday money one year - about a thousand dollars - and put it into a long-term CD account under her name, since she was the only one with a bank account there at the time. I hurried into the bank and over to a teller.

"Account number?" she asked.

"I can't remember," I said. "My name's Melissa Chapman."

The woman typed for a bit. "Date of birth?" I told her. She typed some more. "Okay, you had a few accounts, but most of them were closed due to inactivity."

"Is the CD still there?" I asked desperately.

"It is," she said. "Actually, it just matured today. It currently has a value of one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents."

"I'd like to withdraw eight hundred and renew with the rest of it.."

We went through all the boring mechanics of a large financial transaction. At the end of it, I forged Melissa's name (I was out of practice, but it was still close enough that it didn't matter) and she gave me a wad of twenty dollar bills.

"Don't spend it all in one place," she said, winking. I thanked her and rushed to a duty-free shop.

I took a basket and looked around the shop hurriedly, hoping they'd have everything I needed. I spotted a rack of duffel bags and grabbed a red one. Heading over to the toiletry section, I tossed shampoo, soap, conditioner, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some makeup supplies into the basket in rapid succession. Clothes were next. I grabbed a few of everything, since my plan would probably take at least a few days to carry out. I grabbed a leotard, too, hoping both that I was guessing Melissa's size right and that I was going to need it.

On my way to the checkout I noticed a bunch of purses and wallets. I grabbed one of each.

After paying, I put everything in its proper place, tossed my purse into the duffel bag, and headed for a ticket counter. It was time to take a trip to Yellowstone.


	5. Chapter 5: Cassie

THE SALVATION

CASSIE

I slumped into the chair behind my desk, exhausted. As much as I treasured the rare opportunities I got to go out in the field these days, they left me feeling so drained I sometimes wondered why I even bothered. It wasn't as though I didn't have a team of park rangers to send after the drunken idiots harassing the Hork-Bajir, but I still felt like I had to take care of things myself.

Of course, my outdoor escapades gave me the opportunity to morph. I didn't morph at all outside of my job anymore. I just didn't have the time. My numerous meetings with important scientists had tapered off now that I had finally made it clear that the Hork-Bajir didn't want to be examined by curious humans, but I still had government meetings to attend, grant applications to write, Hork-Bajir ceremonies to take part in, and a whole host of other duties that came with the liaison job. Hell, with all that work, I barely even saw Ronnie anymore, and he worked for me.

Poor Ronnie. He'd been there for me after the collapse of my relationship with Jake, and he'd been able to help me carry out my dreams of running the Hork-Bajir preservation. We married about a year after Jake and the others had left in their captured spaceship, and we couldn't have been more in love. Now, between my heavy workload and his frequent travel, he got to see me about once a month, if that. When was the last time we'd had dinner together? A year ago? Two?

Deep down, I knew I didn't actually have to do all this work myself. The only person shoveling all these duties on me was me. I had a large budget for staff, most of which got spent on other things as the money was needed. But I felt like I _needed_ to do all of this myself. I had been one of the six who protected and aided the original free Hork-Bajir colony, wasn't I? Delegating my jobs to other people would be tantamount to abandoning the duty I'd taken on all those years ago, and whatever I might have claimed to Jake in my more bitter moments of the war, I never would leave a job unfinished.

The speaker on my desk buzzed, snapping me out of my reverie. I pushed the button. "What is it, Wendy?" I asked, briefly entertaining the notion of Marco attempting to put the moves on her with that old Association song.

"There's a young woman here to see you," my secretary replied. "Her name is Melissa Chapman."

My blood turned to ice, and I couldn't fathom why.

"She says she doesn't have an appointment..." Wendy continued disdainfully.

"No, no," I cut her off. "It's fine, I don't have anything to do right now. Send her in."

A minute later, my office door opened and Melissa came into the room. I suppressed a shiver of revulsion. Not at Melissa, who had been Rachel's best friend for years before the war, but because in her face I could see traces of her father, one of the higher ranking human-Controllers in Visser One's army. Mr. Chapman was an adversary of ours from the very beginning, and despite knowing that he was only a voluntary Controller to keep his daughter free, it was still hard to separate man from Yeerk.

All of this ran through my head in about half a second. Then I smiled. "Melissa, it's been years. Please, sit down."

"I haven't got time, Cassie," Melissa said urgently. I frowned. Her voice was familiar, but different. I hadn't spoken to her in years, but was her inflection different? Her pronunciation? I couldn't figure it out. "I need you to come with me right away to find Marco."

"Whoa." I held up my hands. "Wait. Stop. Melissa, we barely know each other. I can't just drop all my duties to go gallivanting off with you to some foreign country to find a man I haven't spoken to in years." I sighed. "I have a _job_, Melissa. I have so many things to do now that I never see my husband."

"Look, Cassie, I swear this will be worth your while." Melissa was really agitated now, pacing back and forth in front of my desk. "Finding Marco could be the key to getting Tobias back."

"Melissa, Tobias doesn't _want_ to come back." I stood up and grabbed her shoulders, stopping her pacing and forcing her to look at me. "I've been out to his meadow myself. He was quite clear that I should never come back, and that he was done with human society."

The other woman gave me an unfathomable look. "You mean you haven't heard?"

"Heard what?" I dropped my hands to my sides. "What's happened?"

"It's all over the news," Melissa said. "A bunch of Controller extremists claim they've captured an Animorph, they've got footage of a red-tail in captivity."

I turned away and walked back to my desk. "There's a lot of red-tailed hawks in the world," I said, rummaging around on my desk for nothing in particular. "There's no way of knowing it's really Tobias, and that they aren't just making stuff up. I can't just leave based on guesswork and speculation."

"Listen, Cassie." Melissa was clearly angry now. "If anybody would be able to identify Tobias at a glance, it's me. That was _definitely_ Tobias in that box, there's no doubt about it. Why are you refusing to help him? Is your job that cushy, that you're not willing to risk it for one of your supposed friends?"

"What are you talking about?" I spun around and walked up to her, my face inches from hers. "You talk like you knew Tobias. But I know for a fact that if you ever met him, it was in the hallway at school before he was trapped as a hawk. I don't want you throwing accusations in my face about how I abandon my friends." I resisted the urge to slap her and walked back to my chair, throwing myself into it and looking through the folders stacked in my inbox. "Get out."

There was a brief silence, and I heard Melissa sink into a chair. "Oh... Cassie, no, I'm sorry. Crap, I... look, I didn't mean to..."

"What part of 'get out' didn't you understand?" I glared at her.

Melissa looked away. "Cassie... there's one thing I haven't told you. I probably should have told you this up front, but I was worried that you wouldn't even wait to hear me out." She drew a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. "Cassie, I'm not Melissa. I'm Rachel."

I kept looking into her eyes, not moving. After a long silence, I spoke. "If you don't walk out of this office, right now, I will morph into a wolf and rip your throat out. That is not an idle threat. Never come back here."

Melissa stood up, throwing her hands in the air. "I swear to God, Cassie, I wouldn't make this up! Look, ask me anything."

"Why should I humor you?" I stood up. I was yelling now. I didn't want to yell, I hated to yell, but I couldn't control myself anymore. "Why should I let you stand in my office for even one more second after saying that?"

"In sixth grade I helped you pick out a present for Jake, but you were so terrified you ended up throwing it away instead of giving it to him. It was a Weezer CD, I think, it had just come out." She looked back at me, imploring. "You made me promise never to tell him, or anyone else."

All the anger drained out of my body, to be replaced by utter shock. I collapsed into my chair. "R... R..." I couldn't speak.

Rachel walked around the desk and wrapped her arms around me. I burst into tears against her shoulder.

* * *

It took me about an hour to stop crying, but finally I peeled away from Rachel and held her at arms length, eyeing her. "Rachel, how did you do this? How did this _happen_? I don't even know what's going on anymore."

"There'll be time to explain everything later," Rachel said. "There's more important things to take care of right now. We need to focus on Tobias."

"You're right." I sat back down in my chair and started rifling through my drawers. "You're sure it's really him?"

"Cassie, I've spent so much time with him that I could probably identify a feather from his wing." She gave a weak smile. "There's no doubt in my mind that it was Tobias."

"Ha!" I pulled a letter out of a bunch of reports and slapped it on the desk triumphantly. "Sorry. Found what I was looking for."

Rachel craned her neck and looked at the paper. "Is that a letter from Marco?"

"I got it about a year after they all got back," I said. Marco had written to tell me where he was and how I could reach him if I needed to. I didn't need his signature to know it was from him -- the letter was peppered with misspellings that I didn't think anybody else could possibly have come up with, littered with bad jokes, and had a barely detectable undercurrent of world-weariness. I hated to disrupt Marco's idyllic life in some Asian nation-state, but Rachel had made it quite clear that he was needed for this. "Unfortunately, he can only be contacted in person, and the country he's in is travel-restricted," I told her. "I'm going to need to use all my pull to get us there."

"We're on a time limit," Rachel said, pointing to an imaginary watch on her wrist. "Tick-tock. Let's get moving."

I paged my secretary and told her to cancel all my appointments for the foreseeable future, and Rachel and I headed out the office's back door and headed for my car.


	6. Chapter 6: Rachel

THE SALVATION

RACHEL

It was almost suspicious how easy it was to get permission to go to whatever country Marco had chosen as his extradition-free paradise. I expected it to take us days of being shunted between government departments, but apparently Cassie had some important friends in the Department of the Interior and it just took about five hours of paperwork, lying, and negotiation to get me permission to travel on her passport.

We took an orbital hopper over to the country. Of the scientific advances the Andalites had shared with us, the ones that advanced our local space travel had probably helped us the most. Space exploration was much more frequent and a colony on Mars was already in the planning stages. The orbital hopper had arguably the biggest impact on commerce, enabling people to travel between any two points on the globe in the matter of a couple hours. They were far out of the ordinary person's price range, but the government kept a bunch on hand and lent Cassie and me one for the trip.

It took us about two hours to get to MarcoLand, as I thought of the place, so on the way over I told Cassie exactly how I happened to be sitting next to her in Melissa's body. She didn't say anything, but she was listening so intently it almost made me uncomfortable. After I finished, she was quiet for a long time. Finally, as we were starting our descent, she spoke up.

"You probably should've approached one of us before you went to Tobias," she said, strapping herself in. I did likewise. "He might've been more willing to listen with one of us to vouch for you."

"I know," I said, sighing. "That was stupid of me, I guess. But I suppose I didn't see why anybody else needed to get involved. You were all busy with your own lives, and my coming back would've just been a disruption."

"I'll say," Cassie said, grinning.

"You know what I mean. You'd all moved on, you didn't need me." I leaned my head back against the seat. "Tobias had nothing else. He was so broken after I died, Cassie, you saw him."

"I understand." She closed her eyes as the cabin started to shake. "Urgh, I hate this part."

* * *

"Holy Christ on a cracker," I muttered as we approached the grandiose gate of the grounds where Marco lived. "What is this, Daddy Warbucks's house?"

The gates were a glittering gold monument to opulence, barring the gap between the massive marble walls that marked the boundaries of Marco's estate. Off in the distance we could see his mansion, an intimidating Gothic masterpiece that must have cost a fortune. It was a vain tribute to wealth, influence, and status - basically everything you'd expect from Marco's house.

Once we got in the grounds, we saw that there were animals roaming around everywhere. Mostly smaller mammals and reptiles, but there were a couple crazier things like a monitor lizard and a Siberian tiger. I idly wondered how Marco kept them from killing each other as we were led around the side of the house, which was even more impressive up close.

When we got to the back, both of us stopped short. "Is that an _Olympic-sized swimming pool_?" Cassie asked incredulously.

‹You know it,› came a familiar thought-speak voice. ‹There's three hot tubs, too.›

We looked around and saw an Irish Setter trotting happily up to us from the garden. ‹What can I do for you ladies?› Marco asked.

"I need to talk to you, Marco," Cassie said. "About something very important, privately.."

‹Sure thing.› He demorphed, grabbing a bathrobe from his butler. He threw the robe on over his morphing suit as he led Cassie further along the swimming pool.

They talked quietly for several minutes. Marco pointed over at me, and Cassie put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him that made him sit down heavily in a nearby chair. He looked over at me for a long moment before he stood up again. He said something to Cassie and gestured at the house, but she shook her head. Marco walked past her and back to where I stood.

He poked me in the gut. "So you're really back," he said doubtfully. "Rachel, in Melissa's body."

"That's right." I nodded.

"Jeez." He looked like he was going to fall over, but quickly regained his composure. "It's good to have you back, Rachel." It seemed like he was going to try to hug me, but then he aborted that and went with a handshake instead. "If you need anything, Just ask."

"Well.. I hate to bother you here, but I really, really need your help. Did Cassie tell you why we're here?"

"Something about the Bird-boy," Marco said. "He's been hawknapped?"

"Yes, and we need to get him out," I said, plopping down in one of the lawn chairs that littered the poolside. "I hate to admit it, but I needed you because you're the best planner out of all of us."

"But I'm not a leader." Marco was staring into the pool. "We need Jake."

And there it was. He'd finally mentioned the metaphorical elephant in the living room that was my plan. Of _course_ we needed Jake, Jake was our leader. We may not have been Andalites, but Jake was our Prince nonetheless. But he was locked up in a maximum-security military prison, waiting to go to trial for stealing that captured Yeerk shuttle he'd used to go after Ax. But going after Jake didn't jive with my plans at all. I still needed to be morph capable, and for that to happen...

"That's not going to work," I said. "We already need to break into one military base. There's no way we'll be able to manage two."

"Wait, hold up," Cassie said. "When did we decide to break into any military bases?"

"Cassie, do you really think I'm going to let you guys go after Tobias without me?" I rolled my eyes. "We need to get our hands on the morphing cube."

"So if we go after Jake-" Marco began

"Will you two listen to me?" Cassie said sharply. "What you're suggesting is hugely illegal. It's enough that we bent some rules to come here, but breaking into military bases is _wrong_. And as much as we might want to bust him out, Jake was imprisoned for breaking the law. He _should_ be in there."

I looked at Marco. Marco looked back at me. We both looked at Cassie, then looked back at each other.

"So if we go after Jake," Marco continued, "should we do it before or after we get the cube?"

Cassie threw her hands up and stalked toward the house. I wasn't worried, though. She'd come around eventually, like she always did.

Once our plan was set in stone, Marco excused himself to "go wrap up some business" in the mansion. Cassie and I went to wait for him at the airport. When he caught up with us, Cassie flashed her passport at the guard, who let us through the gate. We climbed into the orbital hopper and set off for the States. The plan was finally in motion.


	7. Chapter 7: Jake

THE SALVATION

JAKE

Ennui.

I read that once, years and years ago, in a book I was assigned for English class. I hated the book, but I looked up the word and it stuck with me. It was basically a heavy depression caused by severe boredom, and it was probably the best word to describe my time in prison. I was never allowed to leave my maxiumum-security cell, probably because they were afraid I'd morph and try to escape. Not that I wanted to escape. I knew what I was getting myself in when we stole the _Rachel_, and I was ready from the start to serve my time. I'd accomplished what I'd wanted to, hadn't I? I had nothing important left to do.

I just wished they'd give me something to stimulate me. A book, a movie, something. But my entire life was just a blur of eating and sleeping now. I could keep track of the time, more or less, though a small window near the ceiling, but there was a faint glow across it and I was fairly sure there was a Gleet Bio-Filter covering it to make sure I didn't escape as a fly or something.

Whatever.

Today I was occupying myself by building a tower out of my meal trays. They never came to take them back, you see, and I'm pretty sure it's because they're terrified of me. With good reason: I had at least seven morphs I used on a regular basis that could rip them apart. At any rate, I was doing my best to make the tower structurally sound, but my materials were limited and I'd never even finished my sophomore year of high school, so my engineering skills were kind of lacking. I had just started on the third attempt when it happened.

‹Jake.›

I didn't react. If I reacted, they would see. I'd never been able to spot the cameras, but I knew they were hidden in here somewhere. They must be. How else would they be able to find out if I'd killed myself if they didn't come in the cell?

‹Jake, if you can hear me, scratch your left ear.›

Just to be contrary, I reached up and scratched my right ear. Whoever was thought-speaking to me laughed, and I knew it was Marco.

‹You're as big a jackass as always,› he said. ‹Listen, buddy, I know you're having the time of your life locked up in here, but we're gonna be busting you out soon.›

I looked thoughtfully at what I'd built so far, then shook my head and started dismantling it.

‹You don't have any choice, Jake. Stop being all noble. We need you. Tobias needs you.›

I wished I could talk to him. I could morph, of course, and talk to him privately, but I hadn't morphed since I'd been put in this cell, and it would look suspicious if I did now. But I knew Tobias didn't need me or anybody else except the person he couldn't have. I kicked the trays and flopped down onto my cot.

‹No, listen to me, Jake. Tobias has been kidnapped. We're going to go after him, but we need you. You're the fearless leader. We can't do this without you.›

Desperately, I focused my thoughts on Marco. _We? What _we_? Cassie is taking care of the Hork-Bajir colony, Rachel is dead, and Ax is off-planet. And since when have you cared about Tobias?_

He didn't hear me, of course, but he knew me well enough to know what I was thinking. ‹Me and Cassie were talked into it by... a friend. But she needs to be able to morph so she can help us, so we're going to steal the morphing cube. We'll be back once we're through with that. Don't argue, just nod.›

Very slowly, taking care to look like I'd fallen asleep, I moved my head up and down in a single nod.

‹Good. I'll see you later, Jake. Take care.› He paused for a minute. ‹I may be a little hairier then.›

I couldn't help it. I smiled a little.

‹Ha! I knew the old Jake was in there somewhere. I'll be back.›

Once Marco left, I drifted off into the most restless sleep I'd had in a long time.


	8. Chapter 8: Marco

THE SALVATION

MARCO

In the end, we all decided it was best to go after the morphing cube first. Sneak in, grab the cube, get Rachel some morphs, put the cube back, then go after Jake with all the firepower we had. Simple, right?

Nothing's ever simple with us. I should've known that.

"I miss having Tobias with us," Cassie muttered as she looked through binoculars at the distant military base. "Much easier to have him scout ahead." She handed me the binoculars. "There's guards on all four corners of the roof looking inward."

I scanned around the roof. "I see them. There's probably guards on the ground, too."

We were crouched in some shrubbery in the forest surrounding the supposedly secret military base where they kept the morphing cube. Realistically, it had taken Cassie about ten minutes to find out where it was hidden once we got back to the States. "You start to understand how to read government-speak after a while," she'd said.

"I guess we'll need to go osprey," I said.

Cassie gave me a look. "Marco, ospreys only hang out together during mating season, and then only at their nest, and that's completely _apart_ from us both having the same osprey morph."

"Seagull, then?" I suggested.

"Marco, do you see any _sea_ around here?" Cassie asked frustratedly. "We're a couple thousand miles from any large bodies of water _I _know about, how about you?"

"Well do you have any better ideas?" I asked. "Because I'm open to suggestions here."

"How about you just morph orcas?" Rachel put in helpfully. We ignored her.

"As a matter of fact, I do," Cassie said. "Take another look at the roof. Do you see that air vent?"

I looked through the binoculars again and scanned the roof. "Yeah. But that thing's tiny."

"Yes," Cassie said patiently, "but it's plenty big enough for squirrels."

I thought for a second. "Huh. You're right."

"So what's the plan?" Rachel asked me.

"Cassie and I morph squirrel, get into the air vent, make our way to the morphing cube," I said. "We grab it, haul tail, bring it back here to you. Once we've got you morphed up again, we put it back if the base isn't on alert."

"Let's get started then," Cassie said, already starting to morph.

"Right." I focused on the squirrel DNA inside my body.

It was really, really weird, let me put that right out there. In the past few years, I'd only been morphing a few animals. Fun ones, like dogs. I was used to morphing dogs. So to do a squirrel again was like morphing for the first time.

First I watched Rachel disappear into the sky above me as I sank toward the ground. I could feel my ears moving up to the top of my head at the same time. My nails grew out from my fingers as hair sprouted all over my body like I was some kind of human Chia pet.

My arms and legs started to shift as the tail sprouted from behind me, and the bones in my face began to rearrange themselves. I watched as my nose ran away from my eyes and my hands became paws. Finally my vision went blurry and my hearing and smell grew sharper and I knew the morph was done.

I started to panic. There was another squirrel near me and she'd take my food if I wasn't careful, but there were bigger things on my mind at the moment. Something enormous was _right next to me_. I scampered up a tree as quickly as I could.

‹Marco!› I heard Cassie say in my head. ‹Get a grip!›

I focused hard and brought the squirrel's mind under my control. ‹Sorry,› I said. ‹It's been a while.›

"Are you done being an idiot yet?" I heard Rachel say from the ground. "Morph clock's counting down. Get in there."

‹Right.› I said. ‹Come on, Cassie.› As if I wasn't the one wasting time panicking and running all over the place.

Cassie joined me on the branch and suddenly it was a race, the two of us flying along in the direction of the compound, jumping between trees, running full tilt along branches, neither of us ever really gaining much ground on the other. We reached the treeline and _leapt_ and suddenly we were scrabbling on concrete, running toward the air vent as fast as we possibly could. I heard a shotgun go off.

‹HOLY CRAP.› I dove into the nearest hiding place, which happened to be the air vent. BANG. I hit the end of it and tumbled down what felt like a mile. I landed with a thud at the bottom of a long shaft and Cassie landed on me.

‹Thank you, Cassie, for that,› I said. ‹That was _exactly_ what I needed after being shot at and falling twenty feet down a ventilation shaft.›

‹Well gee, Marco,› Cassie replied, ‹you just looked so comfortable I couldn't resist.›

I knocked her off of me and looked around the dimly-lit chamber with my weak squirrel eyes. ‹Looks like we can go three ways from here,› I said. ‹Should we split up or just guess and hope for the best?›

‹I don't think we'd be able to find each other if we split up,› Cassie said. ‹Might as well stick together.›

I pondered the options. ‹The middle one probably heads towards the center of the compound,› I mused. ‹They'd want to keep the cube there to make it harder to break in and get, I think. Let's head that way.›

We headed through the tunnel, occasionally hitting intersections and guessing at which one headed for the center. A couple of times we fell down shafts that we hadn't spotted before we hit them. I was praying this wasn't a heating system, remembering the time I nearly burnt myself to a crisp as a spider.

As I scampered toward another intersection up ahead, Cassie said, ‹Marco, stop. Come look here.›

I headed back to where she'd stopped, silhouetted against a glow from the vent behind her. I looked through the slats. The room was unlit except from the center, where I could blurrily see a pedastal with something glowing on top of it. ‹Bingo.› I said. Then I realized that we had overlooked a huge flaw in our plan. ‹Uh, Cassie? How do we get in there? And how do we get the cube out?›

‹Well, we just have to morph to cockroach or something--›

‹Cassie, there's not even enough room for _one_ of us to demorph in here. It'd break before we could morph again.›

‹We could head back to the last intersection up,› she suggested.

‹We'd never make it back as cockroaches.› I shook my squirrel head. ‹And we'd never be able to carry the thing out that way, either. And wouldn't they notice the cube moving itself? There must be cameras in there.› I was furious at myself. How could I have overlooked so much wrong with my plan? There were so many problems I should've spotted, but I was so eager to be _doing_ something again that I didn't bother to look at what I was doing from all the angles, hadn't considered every detail.

‹Okay, calm down,› Cassie said. ‹You head for that intersection up there, I'll go to the last one, and we'll try to squirm back as humans. Then we do battle morphs, grab the cube, and run for dear life.›

‹Whatever.› I headed to the intersection I was going to before we spotted the cube and started to demorph. As soon as I was done I squirmed back to the vent where we saw the cube. I spotted Cassie doing the same, fitting slightly better than I was. When we were both there, I focused on my battle morph.

Immediately the black hair sprouted all over my body. I felt my facial features rearranging themselves into the familiar face of Big Jim, the gorilla from the Gardens. It was like visiting an old friend after years apart. I looked over at Cassie and saw that she was already entirely Hork-Bajir, minus the blades. ‹Get on with it!› she urged me.

I focused on finishing up the morph. My muscles bulked up threefold and suddenly the metal around me began to bend... buckle... _SNAP_. The shaft broke and dumped us both into the room. Cassie grew her blades as I grabbed the morphing cube.

Suddenly, the lights in the room snapped on. We were surrounded by a dozen armed and armored guards.

‹Well, this is bad.›


	9. Chapter 9: Cassie

THE SALVATION

CASSIE

I looked over at Marco, who looked about as thoughtful as a gorilla can get. ‹Marco, you can't seriously be thinking of fighting our way out of this.›

‹I don't see any other alternative, do you?›

‹Not really,› I said, ‹but that would be suicide. How about we surrender until we think of something less lethal?›

I was spared his snarky response when the door to the chamber opened. Two men armed with shredders walked in and stepped to the side, opening the way for an Andalite to enter.

The Andalite was older than Ax, as far as I could tell, and probably of a high rank, judging by his bearing. His tail was relaxed at the moment, but I knew he could have it buried in either me or Marco at a moment's notice. He glared at us with his main eyes while his stalk eyes swept the room.

‹Did anybody else come with you?› he asked.

‹No,› I said.

‹I don't trust you,› he said, although I noticed his stalk eyes were moving somewhat slower now. ‹I am War-Prince Bormahen-Teliel-Nalesh, and I am in command of this base. Tell me who you are and why you are attempting to steal this Escafil Device.›

We remained silent.

‹As you wish,› the War-Prince said. ‹I suppose you won't demorph, either. Come with me.›

He turned and left the room, followed by his guards. We went after them with two of the armed men from the room behind us.

‹We can't let them take us wherever we're going,› I said privately to Marco. ‹I'll lose my job if I'm found out.›

Marco laughed silently. ‹We've been caught stealing high-security government-controlled Andalite technology, and you're worried about losing your job?›

‹Hey, _some_ of us don't live off the interest from our movie deals,› I replied. The humor was forced and nervous, but it helped.

‹Well keep an eye open for an exit and we'll see if you stay employed,› he said.

We were walked through a maze of corridors, completely losing our bearings along the way. A couple times I was almost certain we were walked in circles and taken along different branches of intersections, but the featureless grey walls and doors didn't give us any hints. After about fifteen minutes we were walked through a long, windowed hallway looking out over the jungle below.

‹Now!› Marco shouted as he spun and punched one of the guards in the face, dropping him like a sack of bricks.

The other guard had raised his gun immediately, but I slashed my wrist blade and he suddenly found himself unable to pull the trigger. He dropped the gun and grabbed for his hand, then went flying as my foot connected with his stomach.

The other two men raised their shredders and fired, but Marco and I were already out the windows with a huge crash. Bleeding profusely, we made our way into the forest until we were reasonably sure we weren't being followed anymore and demorphed. Without speaking I immediately remorphed to a wolf. Marco took the hint, and soon we were flying through the woods, hunting for the scent of Melissa Chapman.

When we got to Rachel I had to force myself not to leap on her and attack. It'd been a long time since I'd done the wolf morph. I almost couldn't stop, and ended up doing a stupid little hop in her direction. Marco didn't seem to be having any trouble keeping the instincts down. He dropped the morphing cube at Rachel's feet and demorphed. I was already partway into my morph and my ears were sliding around, but a second later I heard what he was saying to her.

"--probably going to sweep the forest, so let's get you powered up and hope we can find you a good morph for traveling in a hurry. Cassie, come here and put your hand on the cube."

I did as he told me, pressing the square closest to me, on his right.

"Okay, Rachel," he said. "Your turn."

Rachel put her hand on the cube.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash of blue light. Rachel went flying back from the cube and hit a tree. I ran over to her.

"Rachel! Rachel, are you okay?" I waved my hand in front of her face, and poked her. "I think she's unconscious," I told Marco. I took her pulse. "Yeah, her heart's still beating. God, this is some bad timing." I thought for a second. "See if she's got anything we can tie on her."

"She's got her shoelaces," he said, stripping them out of her shoes. "Horse?"

"Yeah," I said, starting the morph. "Can you lllrrrrrrrrhhhh--" My face extended outward, stopping me from talking.

"Lift her?" Marco asked. "Cassie, she can't weigh much over a hundred pounds, I'll be fine." I finished the morph and Marco heaved Rachel on my back, tying her wrists together around my neck and her ankles together around my flank, then started his own horse morph.

‹Let's go!› he said once he finished, and we galloped away into the forest.


	10. Chapter 10: Rachel

THE SALVATION

RACHEL

When I awoke, I had no idea where I was. I had never seen the place before, and Marco and Cassie were nowhere to be seen. I was in a sort of glade with evergreen trees all around and a small pond in the middle. I looked around, making sure I wasn't in any danger, then made my way over to the pond. The water was crystal clear and I could see my face silhouetted against the blue sky.

My true face. Rachel's face, not Melissa's. I reeled back in surprise, then grabbed my hair and looked at it. Blonde, not nearly as pale as Melissa's, but my proper golden blonde, the way it had always been. I couldn't believe it. I looked back into the lake and had another nasty surprise.

I wasn't morphing, but my reflection seemed to be. It shifted in turn to show every morph I had ever acquired, starting with the elephant and eagle and shrew and continuing to shift. Cat, wolf, trout, dolphin, seagull, the shifting image started to accelerate. Soon my face was morphing so quickly it became a blur. The last thing I saw was a beaver grinning cheekily at me before the lake glowed a vibrant azure and became a whirlpool. I pulled back, but the suction from the whirlpool grabbed at me and yanked me into the water. Soon everything went black.

* * *

I woke up again, the muscles in my stomach aching. Cassie was kneeling next to me anxiously and I could see Marco pacing off near a tree. Cassie's concerned look melted into one of relief. "She's conscious," she called over to Marco.

I tried to sit up, winced, and leaned back against the tree behind me. "What happened?" I asked. "Why does my stomach hurt so much?"

Marco crouched down next to me. "We've been talking about it," he said, "and we're not really sure. It was like the morphing cube attacked you."

"It glowed really brightly when you touched it," Cassie continued. "Then you went flying into a tree. I morphed a horse, Marco tied you to my back, and we got out of there as fast as we could. I think we're about sixty miles from the compound now."

"You know," I said, "normally I would be concerned about Marco tying me up while I was unconscious, but I've got bigger issues right now." I described to them what I'd seen while I was knocked out.

Marco shook his head and stood up. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know if it was a vision or just a dream or what. This is just weird. We've never seen anything like this with the morphing cube before."

Cassie was looking at me thoughtfully. "Rachel, try to morph."

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"She hasn't acquired anything yet," Marco pointed out. "Try to morph _what_?"

"I have a hunch," Cassie said. "Try to morph something you acquired before you died."

I shrugged. "Whatever you say." I focused on the grizzly bear that I had used so frequently against the Yeerks.

I felt the changes immediately. Coarse brown hair sprouted from every inch of me and I began to shoot upwards. Shocked, I lost my concentration and the morph stopped.

Cassie looked satisfied. "I thought so," she said.

I finished morphing. ‹What do you mean you thought so?› I asked. ‹Why the hell can I morph things I acquired in my old body all of a sudden?›

"Simple," she said, a maddeningly smug expression on her face. "You need to remember we're dealing with the interference of a being with godlike powers. I think he was just providing a way to get your old arsenal back in a hurry."

"Well I'll be damned," Marco said, walking over to me and rubbing his hand in my fur. "She's a friggin' grizzly bear."

‹Hands off, Marco,› I warned jokingly. ‹I can still take off your head with one swipe.› Marco backed away quickly and I laughed, starting to demorph.

When I was human again, I said, "It's time to go after Jake. I think this time we need to just go in, guns blazing, and bring all the firepower we've got to bear on them."

"I agree," Marco said. "They'll be on the alert for stealth break-ins after the cube fiasco."

I looked around us. "Where is the cube?" I asked.

"It fell apart and disintegrated," Cassie said. "But now isn't the time. Marco knows the way to where Jake is being held. Let's get feathery and head out."

I threw her a mock salute. "Yes, ma'am."

I was out of practice morphing, and I was much slower than the other two. By the time I was fully bald eagle, they were already up in the sky wheeling around. I joined them and Cassie and I fell into a loose formation far behind Marco as we headed off to bust my cousin out.


	11. Chapter 11: Jake

THE SALVATION

JAKE

In the days following Marco's visit, I kept dwelling on what he'd told me. They were going to steal a morphing cube and power up somebody else so they could break me out of prison, so that I could lead them to rescue Tobias from the clutches of some mysterious group? It was completely ridiculous. There was no way they could ever pull it off, and even if they could, there was no guarantee I'd be able to save Tobias. And if I couldn't...

Well, it would just be another name to add to the list.

My edginess must've been visible to whoever was supposed to watch me, because a couple days later three heavily armed guards came to escort me from my cell to a small, windowless room. None of them spoke, but I wasn't feeling very talkative anyway. I hadn't spoken in weeks, actually, not since my court-appointed lawyer had come by to tell me my trial date had been pushed back again. The guards escorted me to a chair in the middle of the room and took up positions around the room that let at least one of them have a clear line of fire at me at all times.

After a few minutes, a gruff-looking man wearing the rank insignia of a lieutenant colonel walked into the room, closing the door quickly behind him and never taking his eyes off me. "Jake Berenson," he said after a minute. "Savior of humanity, bane of the Yeerks, and starship thief."

I tried to talk, but couldn't make much noise. I cleared my throat, made a few humming noises, and tried again. "That's me."

"Don't play coy with me, Berenson," the lieutenant colonel spat. "I want to know who you've been in contact with."

"You're the first person I've spoken to in weeks, sir." It was technically true. I hadn't actually spoken to Marco.

The officer didn't look too surprised by my answer. "You haven't been contacted by any of the other so-called Animorphs?" he demanded.

"No, sir."

"What about any other morph-capable beings?"

"Not unless you or my lawyer can morph, sir," I replied. Inwardly, I was disgusted with myself. Why was I lying to him when I could cut off this ridiculous prison break business once and for all right here?

Of course, I knew the answer. If I told him my friends were coming, I had no way to warn them to stay away. The base would be ready for their arrival, and they would probably be slaughtered. I couldn't let that happen. I'd been responsible for enough death already.

The lieutenant colonel sighed heavily. "Look, Berenson," he said, rubbing his forehead, "I want to be here interrogating you about as much as you want to be here being interrogated. Just tell me what I want to know so that you can go back to your cell and I can go back to dealing with people who don't have the ability to kill me without any weapons."

"I've told you the truth, sir," I said. He wasn't exactly wrong, but the backhanded accusation still stung.

"Fine." The officer gave me a pained look. "One last question. Do you know the location of any of the Escafil devices on Earth?"

"The morphing cubes?" I replied. "No, unless they've left the one on the base I was stationed at alone."

"All right." The lieutenant colonel gestured to the guards and left the room. After about a minute, the soldiers escorted me back to my cell.

* * *

After three more days of this, I was about ready to scream. Had I been pitying myself for not having any company during my long days alone in prison? Forget it, this was far worse. Always the same questions, always with more intensity than the last time. Something big had gone down, I gathered, and they were sure that I was the cause. The fact that they weren't very far off the mark made it even more stressful to sit through.

I returned to my cell on the fourth day and had just started to eat my now-cold dinner when I heard alarms go off in the distance. My heart jumped into my throat. Was this some sort of drill, or had my friends actually arrived today?

Two of the guards who'd escorted me to that day's interrogation rushed into my cell, guns raised and safeties off. "On the bed," one of them ordered. "Do not get up, do not attempt to morph. We are authorized to use lethal force." He trained his gun on me while his partner stood back-to-back with him, aiming at the doorway.

I shrugged and did as he said, trying to stay nonchalant. If this was Marco and the others, then getting myself killed right off the bat wouldn't be the best idea.

Eventually, the sounds of battle started to filter into my cell. The first thing I heard was automatic gunfire, followed by something that sounded like dracon beams but must have been Andalite-made shredders. Shortly after that I heard a sound that made me have to fight to keep a smile off my face: the angry yell of a fully-grown silverback gorilla.

As the noises grew closer, I started to hear individual soldiers shouting to each other. "Reg, duck, he's behind you! Shit, he's got Reg!" "Oh my god, that goddamn gorilla has a _friggin' machine gun_."

‹Oh man,› I heard Marco exult in thought-speech. ‹I haven't had this much fun in forever!›

There were a couple shredder blasts, and I saw two soldiers collapse in front of my cell. The guard covering the door leaned out and tried to take aim, but was forced to jerk back by more shredder fire.

"Everybody look out!" I heard someone yell. "That's not a real Hork-Bajir!"

"Here come the reinforcements!"

Sure enough, I could hear dozens of booted feet marching down the corridor, and my heart sank. There was no way Marco and Cassie would be able to hold out against this many troops.

But then I heard a sound that made me stop breathing, and that had made deadly Hork-Bajir-controllers tremble in fear.

It was the trumpeting of an angry African bull elephant.

‹Here comes the cavalry!› the elephant crowed, and I could have sworn that I was hearing the thought-speech of Rachel. Obviously the morph was playing tricks with my head, but it was almost uncanny how similar this person sounded.

The thuds of the newly arrived troops being swept aside by the elephant's trunk were the most beautiful music I'd heard in a long time. It was only another minute or so before Marco punched his way through the garrison in front of my cell door and burst in.

He stopped abruptly, faced by one of my guards. "This is on full automatic," the guard explained, nodding at his rifle. "There's no way you'll be able to punch me before I shoot you."

Marco put his hands up in the air in a gesture that would have been comical if the situation weren't so deadly serious. He backed through the door, and then suddenly threw himself to the side as a Hork-Bajir – Cassie – skidded into the space he'd vacated, but crouching. As the guard swung his gun down, she fired her shredder and he dropped like a rock.

The other guard faced her, but pressed his rifle to my head. "One more step," he warned. "One step closer, and Berenson dies."

‹Hold on a second,› Cassie said. ‹Calm down. Maybe we can discuss this.›

"What's to discuss?" the guard said. "It's time for you and your friends to leave the base.

While Cassie kept him distracted, I closed my eyes and focused on some long-dormant DNA in my body. Orange and black fur rippled across my body and my muscles bulked up far beyond what any human could normally achieve.

‹Listen to me,› I heard Cassie saying as I continued the morph. ‹We can still resolve this without killing anybody. This shredder is on stun. Everybody we've hurt will be fine after today, I promise. Please, just step away from Jake.›

The morph finished, and I reached up with a paw and swatted the gun away from my head. As the guard spun towards me I let loose a roar I'd been holding in for a very long time. He was paralyzed in his tracks as over one hundred decibels of pure terror slammed into him. Cassie took the opportunity to quickly dispatch him with her shredder.

‹Time to get out of here!› I announced.

‹Oh Jake,› Marco said as he joined Cassie and me, ‹you're so alluring when you take command.›

We fled the base through the elephant-shaped holes in most of the walls leading to the outside. ‹Do you have a bird morph?› I asked the elephant.

‹Yeah,› she – or he, but I was fairly certain it was a woman – said. ‹I see what you're getting at. You head off, I'll meet up with you guys soon.› We veered away from the elephant to find a more inconspicuous spot to demorph and regroup.

* * *

We sat in silence for about twenty minutes waiting for her to catch up. After making sure we'd lost any pursuit and demorphing, we'd remorphed into wolves and sped further into the forest, hoping to confuse our pursuers. Given that we hadn't been found yet, we were probably safe for the time being.

It was night by the time she flew in as a great horned owl, fluttering to the ground and demorphing in the middle of the loose triangle we had made. When she finished demorphing, I smiled a little sadly. It was a bit unrealistic to have thought that it had been Rachel, but it would be good to have Melissa on our side.

"Melissa," I said, putting more warmth into my smile. "It's been a while. How are you?"

Instead of answering, Melissa walked over and sat down next to me, looking directly into my eyes. "Jake," she said, sounding as serious as if somebody had died, "there's something really, really important you need to know, right now."


	12. Chapter 12: Marco

THE SALVATION

* * *

A brief author's note: I know you guys probably want to see another Tobias chapter by now, and I really want to write one, but the story is really dragging me in another direction, and I don't think I'd be able to write a really satisfying one at this point. I need another chapter or two to get the other Animorphs ready to go, but then we'll definitely see Tobias again.

There's an f-word in this chapter, but I think it is absolutely crucial given the context. If that sort of thing offends you, please try to understand.

* * *

MARCO

I've known Jake for a very, very long time, longer than either of us can remember. I was with him through the entire covert war we fought against the Yeerks, from the time he found out his brother was a Controller to the moment he watched Rachel die after killing Tom. But never in all my life had I seen Jake's face twist into such an ugly mask of hatred and disgust as it did when Rachel told him who she was, and I've never seen it since. It was more full of loathing than any enemy I've ever faced, more anguished even than I felt when I discovered my supposedly dead mother was the highest-ranking human-controller on Earth.

Cassie and I were at his sides in a heartbeat, grabbing his arms to stop him mid-lunge and keep him from trying to murder Rachel with his bare hands. "LET GO OF ME!" he yelled at us. "I'll kill her! I'll _kill_ her!" He started to grow, and I knew he was going to morph something far more dangerous than his tiger. White shaggy fur sprouted, making my hand slip off his arm. What could I do to stop a polar bear morph? The only thing I could morph was another polar bear, and there's no way I'd be able to stop him without killing him that way. I had to try and calm him down somehow.

"Jake! Don't do this, man," I begged him. "You need to stay calm. Keep your cool, man. Demorph." I stepped between him and Rachel and shot her a warning look. "Don't morph anything. We need to keep this calm." I looked at Jake again. "Jake, buddy, I know you. You don't want to do this. You don't want another death to blame yourself for."

Jake seemed to hesitate. ‹It would be worth it,› he said, but he didn't sound sure of himself anymore.

"Come on, Jake," Cassie said placatingly. "You've just let your anger get the better of yourself. Demorph. Take a couple deep breaths."

For a breathless, terrifying second I thought he would reach out and backhand her into a tree with one of his dinner plate-sized paws. I sighed with relief when he began to shrink back to his normal size.

When he was human again, Jake walked away from us and sat on a log, facing away, breathing slowly and holding his head in his hands. After a few long minutes, he walked back over and glared at us. "I want proof."

"Proof?" I laughed mirthlessly. "Jake, if we had _proof_, don't you think we would've pulled it out when you were trying to _kill_ her?"

"She has all of her old morphs," Cassie said. "Something weird happened when we powered her up with the cube, we think it has to do with the way she came back."

Jake stalked up to her angrily and stuck his face in hers. "Do you call that proof?" he demanded. "What kind of idiot do you think I am? All you had to do was run around getting her Rachel's major morphs as fast as you could before you came after me."

"Why the hell would we do that?" I burst out. "I mean, I'm sorry, Jake, but believe it or not, our lives don't revolve around making you absolutely miserable."

He blinked at me for a second, then stalked away from Cassie in my direction. "You wanted to... to raise my spirits," he said. "Raise my morale, so I could be the leader you thought you needed to go after Tobias."

Rachel must have had enough, because she finally strode over to Jake. "Look at me, Jake," she demanded. "Look me in the eyes. Tell me what you see."

He reluctantly did as Rachel demanded. "I see Melissa Chapman. I don't—" He cut off with a strangled gasp.

"I was brought back, Jake," Rachel said firmly. "Brought back in Melissa's body by someone like the Ellimist. He said he was the judge of the game with Crayak, and that he could interfere. Said he liked me." She looked as if she was being forced to eat something disgusting. "I could reject his offer, or I could… I could take Melissa's body. She was brain-dead in the hospital, he said. Everything I went through in the hospital confirmed that. But I can't help wondering if he had somehow _arranged_ everything to be that way, if Melissa had really been lying like a vegetable in the hospital before he'd come to me." Jake was silent before her torrent of words. Trying to speak now would have been like trying to climb a waterfall.

"Do you know why I came back, Jake? _Look at me_." He had averted his eyes. "I didn't come back to break you out of prison, or to reunite with Cassie and Marco. I came back because _Tobias really fucking needed me_, and I wasn't going to let him suffer another minute if there was any way I could stop that. And you know what? I screwed that up, really badly. And because I screwed that up, some two-bit Yeerk assholes have him locked up God-knows-where, and I am _not going to screw this up again_. I _need_ you, Jake, as much as I need Marco and Cassie. I need you to trust me, and I need you to help me."

Jake stood looking at his cousin for a long minute, not saying anything, his wide-eyed stare saying more than any speech ever could. Wordlessly, he opened his arms to her and collapsed into her grasp, burying his face in her neck, his body wracked with sobs.

* * *

Jake was never the sort of person to just outright break down, but he'd been carrying the guilt for Rachel's death for around a decade, and it weighed him down more heavily than anything he'd done before or since. To have Rachel just suddenly come back into his life was like a bomb going off against all of his carefully constructed mental walls, and all of the emotions he'd been carrying for the past ten years came pouring out of him. It was understandable that it took him a while to calm down after that.

Once he seemed to be able to handle it, the three of us caught him up to what we knew so far, which was depressingly little.

"So what you're telling me," Jake said once we finished, still sounding a bit shaky but suddenly the all-business Animorphs leader again, "is that, based on a grainy video shot by Yeerk terrorists, backed only by their claims, we're going to attempt to rescue a hawk which may or may not be Tobias."

"You're making it sound worse than it is," I protested.

"Am I?" Jake said. "Look, it's all well and good, the Four Musketeers reuniting to save Cardinal Tobias, but can we think about this realistically for a moment?"

All three of us just stared at him in amazement.

"I mean, come on, the odds of this actually being Tobias are—"

"Not that, Jake," I interrupted. "We're all just busy being astounded by your total slaughter of classic literature."

"Give me a break, Marco," Rachel said, throwing me a look. It was going to take some getting used to, seeing those looks on somebody else's face. "We all know you only know the story because of the movie version with Mickey in it."

"Guys," Cassie cut in. "Not the time."

Rachel shot me another dirty look. "Cassie's right. Listen to me, Jake. I've spent more time with Tobias than anybody else here. Right?"

"Well, um, y-yeah." Jake seemed to have been thrown off-balance. "But I don't—"

"But nothing," Rachel cut in. "If there's anybody on this planet who could identify Tobias from a grainy terrorist video, it's me. I am absolutely, one hundred percent certain that that was him."

Jake sat down on the log and thought for a minute. "Okay," he finally said to Rachel. "I trust your judgment. If you say that's Tobias, it probably is." He stood up again and started pacing. "Now, the first thing we—"

"Quiet!" I hissed. I'd heard a noise coming from the direction of the base. I gestured for everybody to get close to the ground.

My hunch proved to be right, and soon we heard the sound of boots crunching across the undergrowth. "Look," a man said. "They can turn into friggin' _anything_. They're probably long gone by now."

"We were told to sweep the woods thoroughly," a woman's voice replied. "Do _you_ want to explain to our bosses that we were too lazy to do the whole thing?"

The man sighed. "Let's just finish this area and report back. If we haven't found them by then, they're probably not around anymore."

"Whatever you say."

I looked at Jake. _Morph_, he mouthed silently at us. I didn't need a second invitation. I immediately began to morph to owl.

Once the owl's night vision kicked in, I looked around at my friends. Cassie was halfway to fly (a pretty horrifying sight, in case you're wondering), but Jake and Rachel were both also partway into owl morphs. ‹Hang on, guys,› I said. ‹Go fly, like Cassie. They'll be suspicious if a fleet of owls suddenly takes off from the ground.›

‹No time,› Jake said. ‹We'll just have to risk it.›

Frustrated, I reversed my morph and started going to fly as quickly as I can, trying to ignore all the unpleasant visuals that involved. Aside from the distinctly unpleasant feeling of most of my insides liquefying, I got most of the way through it okay. It got a lot harder once my eyelids disappeared, just in time to watch my nose and mouth shoot outward, melting together to form the fly's spitting mouthpart. I saw two extra serrated legs burst out of my chest at the same time my gossamer wings shot through my back, and then the morph was finished.

‹There is some really fresh poop nearby,› Cassie said. ‹I forgot how much flies love poop.›

‹Oh man, that smells delicious,› I said. ‹Oh, _ugh_. That's disgusting. It's been too long since I've been a fly, and yet not nearly long enough.› I made my way over to the nearest large heat source and hopped on. ‹All right, Jake or Rachel, whoever I'm on, let's get out of here.›

‹Follow me,› Jake told Rachel. I felt the wind rush over my tiny fly body as the owl whose feathers I was clutching soared into the sky. There was a sudden rush of strange turbulence, but soon enough we evened off and the breeze became steadier.

‹What the hell was that?› I asked.

‹The woman tried to shoot us,› Rachel said, sounding disgusted. ‹She backed off when the guy pointed out that there were four of us at the base.›

‹It's almost like dealing with the Yeerks again,› Cassie said sadly. ‹People are so willing to sacrifice innocent animals to try to find us.›

‹Anyway,› Jake said, clearly trying to change the subject, ‹we've got to decide how we're going to pull this off.›

‹We need to figure out where Tobias is being held,› I said. ‹He could be pretty much anywhere, which complicates things slightly.›

‹Not necessarily,› Rachel countered. ‹We know he started from his meadow and I know what direction he went in. He can't be more than a few hours' flight from there, because he was on the news by the next morning.›

‹Who says they didn't transport him?› I argued. ‹Not for nothing, but if I were an evil terrorist Yeerk bent on conquering Earth singlehandedly, I probably wouldn't sit in one place for very long.›

Rachel scoffed. ‹Come on, Marco. We're talking about some sort of underground group of maybe five Controllers. They wouldn't have access to technology more powerful than dracon beams.›

‹Actually,› Cassie gently pointed out, ‹they've definitely got Yeerk technology, wherever they are. They've obviously got some sort of Kandrona.›

‹Look,› Jake said. ‹If we take the view that he could be anywhere, we might as well give up right now. There's no way we'll be able to find him. We need to assume that they've stayed where they were when they captured him.›

A dark thought occurred to me. ‹Of course, maybe they _could_ move him, but haven't,› I said.

‹Why would they do that?› Rachel wondered.

‹A trap,› Cassie realized. ‹They're using him to lure us in, and we're walking right into a trap.›

‹A trap that needs to be sprung,› Jake said grimly. ‹We're not leaving Tobias in their hands. Let's head to the meadow.›


	13. Chapter 13: Cassie and Tobias

THE SALVATION

CASSIE

It took us a little over seven hours to find the Yeerk base. There was no mistaking it for anything else; a Bug Fighter was sitting directly in the middle of a small clearing that they'd obviously burnt out with their Dracon cannons. Standing next to the closed hatch were two Hork-Bajir-Controllers, looking bored but alert. Each of t ‹›hem held a Dracon beam.

‹How are we going to get past those guards?› I asked, perching in a nearby tree. ‹We can't just sneak past. We need to get them to open the hatch.›

‹We attack, obviously,› Rachel said. ‹They'll call for reinforcements. That'll get the door open.›

‹That could definitely go badly,› Marco argued. ‹We don't know how many people they have. Their base of operations must be bigger than that Bug Fighter. You said there were dirt walls in the video.›

‹I said they _looked_ like dirt walls,› Rachel countered, clearly irritated. ‹I could've been wrong.›

‹Wrong enough for it to have been filmed inside a Bug Fighter?› Jake asked. ‹I don't think so. They've probably burnt out a whole base underneath the fighter that they access through a hatch.›

‹So we're dealing with potentially hundreds of Controllers,› Marco said. ‹Great. Good to know this is completely hopeless.›

‹It's not _that_ bad,› I put in. ‹They clearly only have the one Bug Fighter, and they need to be able to move people relatively efficiently.›

‹So, dozens,› Marco said. ‹Even better.›

‹Look,› Jake said. ‹I think once we get inside, hitting fast and hard is our best option. But we don't want them to know we're on to them until we're inside. Somehow we need to get past those guards without them knowing.›

There was a brief pause, then Marco spoke. ‹Or maybe,› he said slowly, ‹we could ask them to let us in.›

‹Not the time, Marco,› Rachel warned.

‹No, I mean it,› Marco protested. ‹Look, we all have human morphs. All we have to do is get some clothes, say we're more escaped Controllers, and say we want in.›

‹Absolutely _not_,› I said. ‹Just because we compromised our morals during all-out war doesn't mean we can start doing it again with one life at stake. You all saw what that led to. Tell him, Jake.›

There was a pregnant pause.

‹I don't know...› Jake said. ‹That _does_ seem to be the only way to get in without them knowing.›

‹But, I mean, come on!› I sputtered. ‹How can you even be considering this? We've discussed this! If we do something like this, we're no better than _they_ are.›

‹And I'm not sure it would work,› Rachel said, surprising me by coming to my defense.

‹What do you mean?› Marco demanded.

‹I mean that it would be unlikely that four escaped Controllers would have survived this long without any resources,› she explained. ‹That's not a good enough pretext to let us in.›

‹_Three_ disguised Controllers,› I said. ‹I can't stop you from morphing actual people, but I absolutely refuse.›

‹What if I could get us in without you morphing a human, Cassie?› Marco said suddenly. ‹We'd still be, but you wouldn't have to. Would you come along then?›

I thought about it. On the one hand, I shouldn't encourage my friends to start heading down the slippery slope we'd fallen down during the war. But on the other, Tobias's life was at stake and if I didn't help, my friends could all die.

‹That would be...› I searched for a word. ‹Adequate.›

‹All right,› Marco said, taking off. ‹I'll explain on the way back to town. We need to head for Rachel's home away from home.›

‹You guys are gonna be dressed so snappily,› Rachel said. ‹I haven't been able to go shopping in _forever_. Whose expense account are we using?›

I groaned. This wasn't going to be fun.

* * *

TOBIAS

"Report."

The Hork-Bajir sitting in front of the bank of screens opposite my cell quickly swiveled in his chair and jumped up, saluting. "Nothing unusual, sir," the Controller reported in the smooth English this unknown commander had instilled into his Hork-Bajir troops. "Some birds landed not long ago, but they left quickly."

The cane lashed out faster than I expected, smacking across the Controller's temple and sending him tumbling to the floor. He cried out in pain, but the tall, handsome man kept hitting and hitting until the Hork-Bajir was nearly unconscious.

"You _idiot_," he said at last. He flipped the Controller over with the toe of his boot. "I told you to report _any_ wildlife in the area so that I could check on it. Did you somehow misunderstand?"

"Sir," the Hork-Bajir pleaded, "please understand! We're in the middle of a forest! There is so much wildlife- _agh_!" He folded over double as a kick from the man connected with his midsection.

"We need to _know_, Kethel Six-Five-Nine-Zero," the commander said, his voice now quiet but deadly serious, "when the Animorphs arrive. Once they're in our trap, we can finally kill this damn _bird_." He shot a disgusted look at me. "Could we really do no better than a random hawk we found in the forest? They probably recognized that it wasn't Tobias right away, that's why they haven't come."

A voice came from the next room - a voice that I knew from prior experience belonged to a girl not much younger than me. "As we reported, Commander, the field he was known to inhabit had been abandoned for some time. You yourself saw the picture of the shattered urn-"

"Yes, of course." The tall man waved off her objections as a wave of emotion washed over me. My only physical link to Rachel was gone. "We shall wait one more week, and then perhaps we should take a more _direct_ approach to settling our score with the Animorphs, hm?"

He looked down at the Hork-Bajir-Controller cowering on the floor. "Get up, filth," he said, kicking at the prone form. The Controller hopped back to his feet immediately. "Go take your leave now. Tell your replacement he is to come in immediately." The Hork-Bajir saluted and left without speaking, and the commander turned to me. "Soon, my feathered friend, the Animorphs shall arrive. Your days are numbered." Chuckling to himself, he walked out of the room.


	14. Chapter 14: Rachel

THE SALVATION

_Author's Note: The end is very close now. Once I finish this, I'm going to go back and edit the earlier chapters in order to flesh them out, improve the writing, and make some other minor changes. Thanks for sticking with me over the past two years and change it's taken me to write this._

RACHEL

It was incredibly weird morphing another human. I'd only done it once, on the way to the _USS George Washington_, when I acquired a fighter pilot so that I could copilot the fighter Ax stole and blend in better among the ship's crew. But that had been years ago, so doing it again was basically a totally fresh experience.

Most of the weirdness came from the fact that I was more used to morphing things dramatically different from myself, so my features rearranging themselves felt more like an itch than the normal far-off, not-quite-pain sensation of morphing. I grew a little and felt my muscles bulge a bit, while my face tickled as my features rearranged themselves. My hair sucked itself back into my head until it was a short military cut.

Once I finished, I pulled on the clothes I had bought for myself with Marco's Swiss bank account. They weren't as stylish as I would have liked - the others argued that it would be suspicious if we were _too_ well-dressed - but they fit, and that was the important thing. I headed back to the point where the others and I had agreed to meet.

Marco - sharply dressed in the body of one Mister Grant - was the first one back, presumably carrying Jake in his pocket as a cockroach as we'd planned. He nodded at me without speaking as we watched Cassie make her way towards us. Despite her protests, she had partially done a human morph. My old body, to be exact. She'd done it to conceal her features slightly so that she wouldn't lose her job if we were discovered. It was bizarre to look at her; she looked slightly younger since she'd acquired me when I was fourteen or so, and every time I looked at her I spotted some half familiar facial feature. Her hair was a bizarre intermediate color between black and blonde - almost dirty blonde, but not quite.

‹You're still okay with this?› I asked Cassie. She nodded. ‹Okay. Sorry about this.› I drew back my fist and punched her in the face, then shoved her to the ground, dirtying her up convincingly. Marco and I seized her under the armpits and pulled her to her feet, half-dragging, half-walking her towards the clearing.

‹Can someone please tell me what the hell I was thinking?› Marco complained as we walked. ‹I mean, this is _insane_. There's no way they're going to fall for such a stupid trick.›

‹Look at it this way,› I suggested. ‹If it doesn't work, we just start the "busting skulls" phase a little early, that's all.›

‹Great,› Marco said. ‹That's supposed to be comforting?›

‹Same old Rachel,› Jake interrupted. ‹And Marco, at that. Come on, let's focus.›

We emerged into the clearing, and immediately the Hork-Bajir guards straightened up and trained their Dracon beams on us. "Stop!" one of them shouted. We froze. "What are you doing here?"

Marco lifted Cassie's arm into the air. "We've got an Animorph for you!" he yelled back. "We want amnesty!"

"Stay right there," the guard who had spoken said, starting to walk over to us.

‹These guys are pretty well-spoken,› Marco said privately to me.

‹Yeah,› I replied. ‹Maybe we'll find out what their deal is before we knock them senseless.›

‹Or maybe we can just knock them senseless and not worry about it,› he said wryly.

‹I like that idea.›

The guard tilted Cassie's face up, looking her over carefully. "I don't recognize this one. Who is it?"

I shrugged. "Hell if I know, she doesn't say anything to us. We just saw her morphing and thought we'd bring her in here."

"We think she might've been one of those backup troops or whatever they were called," Marco put in.

The guard gestured to the other Hork-Bajir, who pressed a few buttons in the side of the ship. The hatch began to open. "Bring her in here while we check her identity."

We followed the guards into the ship. Now was the hard part. Cassie had tried to coach us on this beforehand, but we hadn't been able to grasp it very well. I focused on my right hand and began to demorph.

Thankfully, Cassie's lessons seemed to have paid off. My hand, and only my hand, shifted back to its natural form. Smiling darkly, I began to morph to grizzly - but since I hadn't demorphed entirely, only my hand could morph.

The Hork-Bajir nearest me was talking into a microphone set into a console. "They say they've brought one of the Auxiliaries," he said. "They want amnesty. Shall I bring them down?" I didn't wait until he got an answer, whacking him over the head with my morphed paw. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Marco doing the same to the other guard with a big gorilla arm. We and Cassie all quickly demorphed to human.

Marco pulled Jake out of his pocket and whispered, "The coast's clear." As Jake began to demorph, Marco and I quickly went all the way grizzly and gorilla while Cassie morphed to Hork-Bajir. A few seconds later, Jake's Siberian tiger joined us.

‹All right, guys,› Jake said. ‹We're not sure how big this base is, but it can't be too huge. If we stick together, we should be able to find Tobias relatively quickly.›

‹Not counting all of the Controllers we'll have to tear through,› Marco put in.

‹Hopefully we'll be able to minimize that, but yes,› Jake said.

They all looked at me.

If I was human, I would've smiled.

‹Let's do it.›


	15. Chapter 15: Jake

THE SALVATION

_I've already started editing the older chapters. You should go back and reread chapter 2 before you read this chapter and the next, because otherwise the resolution of the plot probably isn't going to make any sense._

JAKE

‹Let's do it.›

We jumped through the hatch in the floor of the Bug Fighter and into a room straight out of the majority of our nightmares.

A dozen Hork-Bajir wheeled around from their consoles, staring at us in shock.

‹Uh... just passing through?› Marco said hopefully.

And suddenly we were embroiled in a chaotic battle straight out of the dark, early days of the war. Four animals versus way too many Hork-Bajir Controllers. While I tried to keep out of the way of the arm blades of one, another buried one of his into my flank. I roared and spun, throwing him off of me but tearing a huge chunk of flesh out of my side. The first one came after me now that my back was turned, but I reared up and kicked him like a horse, sending him flying across the room.

Suddenly Rachel was slamming into me, sending me flying into the midsection of a Hork-Bajir on the other side of me. We collapsed into a rolling pile of pain. ‹Rachel! What the hell was that?›

‹Sorry,› she said sheepishly, rolling to her feet. ‹It's these damn bear eyes. I thought the Hork-Bajir was between us.› She quickly put him out of commission with a sledgehammer-force fist to the head and wheeled around to rejoin the fight.

I leapt to my feet and bounded towards a Hork-Bajir who was harrying Cassie while she tried to hold onto another who was struggling to escape her grasp. I clamped my mouth around her assailant's calf and _yanked_. He fell to the floor in front of me, but rolled out of the way of my swiping claws and kicked. His talons dug into the wound in my side, making me roar in pain. I was starting to feel a little woozy from blood loss, but I spun and swept my claws at him. He easily jumped back out of my reach and slashed at my paw, lopping it off.

I stared at it stupidly. This wasn't supposed to happen.

A piledriver gorilla fist slammed into the Hork-Bajir's head, sending him flying in the wall. He fell in a heap at the base, not moving.

‹Jake,› Marco said. ‹You need to demorph, man.›

‹I'm good,› I insisted weakly. ‹I can fight without a paw.›

Marco pointed to what looked like a pile of gore squished into the floor where I had been fighting just a moment ago. ‹Those are _yours_, Jake.›

I looked at the hole in my side. It did seem emptier than it should be.

‹I've got your back, man.›

‹Thanks, Marco.› I focused through the haze of pain and started to shift back into my human body.

By the time I was human again, it was all over. All twelve Hork-Bajir were lying around the room in varying states of damage. Some weren't breathing.

Not that we were in much better shape. Cassie had a couple of spikes missing, Rachel had deep cuts all over, and Marco only had one arm. As I watched they started to shift back into their human forms.

"It's not looking too good if the rest of the base is like this," Marco said once he was back to normal. "We really got hammered back there."

"Oh come on," Rachel said. "We took them out. This isn't going to be a problem."

"Jake nearly _died_, Rachel," Marco shot back. "A couple more battles like that and we're toast. And we're not even up among their elites yet."

"What makes you think that?" I asked, starting to morph back to tiger.

"They are, or at least claimed to be, morph-capable," Marco explained, also starting to morph. "Obviously they're holding back their hurrh hurrh _HUURH-_" Marco was cut off as his vocal cords shifted into those of the gorilla. ‹They're holding off their best troops until further in.›

‹Not much further,› Cassie said, already Hork-Bajir again. ‹I can feel through my feet that there's just solid dirt under here. They've only got one floor of caves.›

Before we could discuss this development any further, a wolverine and a porcupine burst into the room. We all looked at each other incredulously.

‹They don't really get this whole "using animals as weapons" thing, do they?› Marco asked rhetorically. He went to bat aside the wolverine...

...and was shocked to discover that it was no longer there, but in fact doing serious damage to his face, having run up his arm. ‹AHH! What the _hell_?›

‹Shouldn't have understimated it,› Cassie said. ‹Wolverines are known for taking down prey many times their size.›

‹I am not PREY,› Marco complained, grabbing the thing off his face and throwing it to Rachel, who swatted it into a wall with a sickening _CRACK_.

I felt a sudden pain in my leg. While we'd been distracted by the wolverine, it had sneaked up and stabbed me with some of its quills. I went to try to flip it over so I could get at its underbelly with my claws, but every time I tried I was stymied by its sharp spikes. ‹Can someone give me a hand with this?›

Rachel lumbered over and grabbed the thing around the midsection, ignoring the pain from the quills, then stabbed it through the belly herself with her claws. It squirmed for a moment like a fish on a hook, but then stopped moving.

‹Look!›

Our gazes followed Marco's outstretched finger to look at where the wolverine had landed. It was demorphing, but not into a Hork-Bajir or a human.

It was becoming a Yeerk.

‹They're _cheating_,› Rachel said incredulously. ‹Instead of taking a host, they're morphing one for two hours at a time.›

‹Which helps conserve Kandrona batteries,› Marco said. ‹They can put off their hunger for a couple hours at a time, which means they'd only have to feed every one or two weeks.›

‹So the others might have been morph-capable,› I said, ‹and we just caught them by surprise, so they couldn't demorph first.› I moved towards the door. ‹Come on. We need to be careful.›

We stepped cautiously through the doorway into the darker room beyond. Before our eyes could adjust to the darkness, the lights snapped on. There were four armed Hork-Bajir on either side of us, and a young woman with a Dracon beam to Tobias's head.

"I'd recommend you stay very, very still," the woman said.


	16. Chapter 16: Marco

THE SALVATION

MARCO

‹They think I'm a wild bird. Play along.›

It was difficult as hell to not visibly react to Tobias's private thought-speech, but somehow we all managed.

‹What the hell are you trying to pull?› Jake demanded. ‹That's not Tobias.›

"You _think_ it isn't your friend," the woman said calmly, "but are you sure? Is that a risk you want to take?"

Jake hesitated. ‹Perhaps not,› he said guardedly. ‹What do you want in exchange for the bird's safety?›

A strong male voice came from the other room. "We want the Auxiliary Animorph that you brought with you." The owner of the voice strode into the room, revealing himself to be a handsome, tall man about the same age as us, leaning on a cane. "Where is she?"

‹She is safe,› Jake said. ‹We won't be handing her over to _you_ anytime soon, you can be sure of that.›

"I see," the man said, a hint of bitterness creeping into his voice. "_Now_ you act in the best interests of the Auxiliaries. You didn't think twice about sending them to die in droves, but _now_ Jake the Yeerk Killer has developed a conscience."

‹I don't need a parasite to criticize my decisions,› Jake snarled.

The man laughed and suddenly it clicked for me. ‹Jake, this guy isn't a Controller.›

‹What are you talking about?› Jake demanded. ‹Of course he is. He's clearly the leader of this operation.›

"Oh, Jake," the man said mockingly. "Poor, deluded Jake, always thinking he's on top of things, always far less in control than he thinks."

‹Jake,› I pushed on. ‹The Yeerks are a front. This guy isn't motivated by revenge for the Yeerks. _Jake, this is James_.›

Jake stood silently for a moment before sitting down hard. The man's smile grew wider.

‹You can't be James,› Jake said weakly. ‹James _died_. The Taxxons on the Pool Ship said they'd taken out all of the animals in the battle.›

"I was shot, but not fatally," James explained. "I fell unconscious for a while, but managed to drag myself away and demorph during your takeover of the ship." His face grew dark. "I later discovered that only one of the others had survived... or so I thought." He looked significantly at the woman with Tobias and stepped closer, leaning heavily on his cane. "I'll ask again. _Where is the Auxiliary Animorph you brought with you_?"

‹We d-› Jake began, but I cut him off.

‹Come on, Jake, we're not gonna get out of this if we don't negotiate.› I switched to private thought-speech. ‹This fake Auxiliary Animorph is the only thing keeping us and Tobias alive right now, buddy. Play along. Pretend she exists.›

‹I suppose she'd be safe with James,› Jake said publicly. ‹But we need to be sure that our interests will be safe. Hand over the bird and we'll lead you to the girl.›

James laughed. "I'm not as gullible as I used to be, Jake. Lead me to her, and we'll bring Tobias with us."

‹Fair enough, I guess,› Jake replied. ‹We left her in the Bug Fighter. Follow us.›

We headed back into the previous room. The woman roughly shoved Tobias into a small wire cage, then she and James followed us. Jake leapt through the hatch first, followed by Rachel and Cassie. I boosted the two humans up and then pulled myself up behind them. The woman put Tobias's cage down in the corner of the room and the two of them began to look through closets.

"All right," James said. "Where is she?" Behind him, unnoticed by anyone except me, Tobias's beak melted into the piercing mouthparts of a mosquito and he started to shrink.

‹Funny thing about Animorphs,› I said, stalling for time. ‹They're not always easy to find.›

"You can come out!" James shouted. "It's me, James! Remember me? You're perfectly safe!"

‹Another funny thing.› Tobias finished his morph and zipped away from the cage, towards the relative privacy of the cockpit. ‹Animals aren't the only things they can morph. In fact, sometimes they can look like decidedly different people.›

James looked at me for a frozen second, his face a mask of rage. He spun quickly, firing at the empty cage. "Where did the hawk go?" he demanded.

‹Oh, don't worry,› I said easily. ‹Tobias should be rejoining us any second.›

At that moment, right on cue, a Hork-Bajir leapt out of the cockpit door, burying a blade in the woman's neck. She slumped to the floor, bleeding copiously. James dropped his Dracon beam and cane and knelt next to her, trying to staunch the bleeding with his shirt. "Morph," he begged her.

The woman turned her head with difficulty and smiled weakly. "I can't," she said. "Can't focus... can't feel anything below my neck."

James clutched her to his chest. "Please, Collette. _Please_. You need to focus. You can do this. Come on!"

"Sorry."

She went limp in his arms.

After a moment, James rose with murder in his eyes.

‹James-› Jake began.

"You're all going to die now," James growled. A mane sprouted around his neck.

‹James, listen to me,› Jake insisted. ‹I'm sorry. I didn't mean for Collette to die.›

‹Jake.›

‹Not now, Tobias,› Jake snapped. ‹Please, James. It was an accident.›

‹Oh, yes, an accident,› James said acidly. He was fully lion now. ‹Just like the deaths of _all of the other Auxiliary Animorphs_, right? An unintended _side-effect _of everything going according to plan.›

‹James, I don't want to have to kill you.› I could hear the tension in Jake's voice. ‹That you're alive... James, finding out you're not dead was one of the best things that's happened since the war. I never wanted you dead.›

James leapt, but Jake dodged easily out of the way.

‹Jake, he's too far gone,› Tobias pressed.

‹I didn't ask for your opinion!› Jake shouted. ‹I can bring him back to himself!›

Another attack, another deft maneuver away.

‹Fight me, you son of a bitch!›

‹Come with me, James,› Jake urged. ‹We can get you help. I understand. Trust me, if anybody understands what you're going through it would be me.›

‹You couldn't _possibly_,› James snarled. ‹You'd need to have a heart to understand sorrow.›

The two big cats were walking in circles now, eying each other warily. As James passed me, his muscles tensed for another leap.

I decided that enough was enough. ‹Goodnight, James,› I said pleasantly. He turned to me, confused, as I brought my fist down on the top of his head. He hit the floor hard.

Tobias grabbed for his fallen Dracon beam.

‹Stay away from that,› Jake snapped. ‹There's been enough death here today. Let's just get out of here and get airborne.›

Tobias started to demorph as we all left the fighter. He flew up high, wheeled around, then landed on the Bug Fighter. ‹Looks like they haven't got any sentries in the sky,› he reported. ‹You're safe enough to m- AAAAAAAAAGGGH!› Tobias jolted as though he'd been electrocuted, then slid off the hull.

‹TOBIAS!› Jake and Rachel shouted in unison.

The fighter began to take off, and the backwash sent him flying towards us and into Rachel's chest. She caught him easily and we all began to run into the woods as the ship began to maneuver to target us.


	17. Chapter 17: Tobias

THE SALVATION

TOBIAS

When I came to, I was being held in the giant forepaw of a grizzly bear, who was motoring with the other three through the woods as fast as it could. I could hear Dracon fire as trees exploded all around us, and the thought-speech of the others reverberated through my head.

‹Left!›

‹Duck, Marco!›

‹Look out for that branch!›

‹That shot was way too close!›

I could barely feel the bear's grip on me, and at first I'd attributed that to the electric shock paralyzing me. But soon enough my muscles began to ache, and I realized that the bear was actually holding me very gently, but firmly enough that I didn't fall. With that realization, all of the pieces of the puzzle fell together in my woozy mind. Only one grizzly bear on Earth knew exactly how tightly she could hold a red-tailed hawk without causing it any damage. The woman who had come after me in the meadow just a week ago. The woman who had probably reunited the Animorphs to find me. The woman who I loved with all of my heart, even after her death.

‹Rachel.›

‹Tobias! You're all right! You had us scared to death back there. I honestly thought you'd died, and that would've been depressingly ironic. Are you paralyzed? Will you be able to fly?›

‹I'm sorry I didn't believe you,› I said, ignoring her torrent of words. ‹It's just... it seemed to improbable. And you remember Aria. In my eyes, it was that all over again, you know? Somebody pretending to be someone who loved me.›

‹I wanted to come after you,› Rachel said. ‹I really did. But I couldn't morph then. We had to steal a morphing cube– oh, it's a long story. I'll tell you when we have time to get caught up. Can you move?›

‹I don't know,› I admitted. ‹I'm not paralyzed, but my muscles are killing me.› I focused on my human body and felt the changes begin. ‹Put me up on your back once I have arms long enough to grab you.›

‹Will do.›

And so we raced on though the woods, a grizzly bear with a guy hanging off her back, while the Bug fighter swooped and fired and the woods turned to mulch.

‹Sorry, guys,› I said. ‹This is my fault. I knocked out the Hork-Bajir in the cockpit, but I guess he woke up sooner than I expected. He must have electrified the hull before he took off.›

‹Oh, don't worry about it,› Marco said. ‹We'll live. Or maybe not! It's just like old times.›

‹Insane?› I suggested.

Marco laughed. ‹Yeah, basically.›

Suddenly the Bug fighter stopped firing. It banked back to where it had come from and sped away from us. We all stopped in our tracks. ‹The hell?› Marco said.

‹James must have woken up,› Jake suggested. ‹Ordered the Hork-Bajir to return to base.›

‹He'll be back,› Rachel warned.

‹Of course,› Jake agreed with a hint of bitterness. ‹He won't rest until I'm dead. Not after what I did to him.›

‹That was a decade ago, Jake,› Cassie said gently. ‹You can't keep judging yourself based on a decision you made when you were sixteen. You need to move on.›

Jake sighed. ‹Yeah, I guess. Still, though, James is definitely a dangerous enemy. Tom's Yeerks were bad enough, but we know what it's like to face a single morph-capable enemy.›

I felt Rachel's fur prick up on end. She had always refused to discuss David with me, and I never pressed because of how upset it made her. Still, it was obvious she never had quite recovered from that entire ordeal.

‹Let's get a little further into the woods and then get feathery,› Jake ordered.

* * *

A couple hours later, we were all sitting in Cassie's old barn, meeting just like in the old days. Marco and Rachel were lounging on hay bales, Cassie was sitting on a dusty stool, and Jake was pacing around near the door. I was up in the rafters, keeping watch out of habit more than anything else. Rachel beckoned me down and I fluttered to her forearm. She started stroking my crest as Jake began to talk.

"First things first. Marco needs some way to slip out of the country under the government's nose. I was busted out of prison by a gorilla shortly after the _same_ gorilla stole the morphing cube. A quick check would have let them know Marco wasn't at home, so they know he's here and they'll be watching for him to leave." He looked at Cassie. "Any way you could work up a fake passport for him? Or get him traveling on yours?"

Cassie shook her head. "I'm going to be in deep enough trouble as it is. I took a trip to his country just before those attacks. I'm probably restricted from travel and I'm willing to bet I'll be arrested as soon as I show up for work."

‹Could he stow away on a freight ship?› I suggested. ‹Find one shipping to someplace in southeast Asia and work your way back from there?›

"It's a possibility," Marco said doubtfully. "Not something I'd want to get caught doing."

"You could hide out until Ax gets here," Rachel put in. "Maybe he'd give you a ride home."

"Bad idea," Jake said. "The Andalite government has a good relationship with the US. We wouldn't want to strain that, or force Ax to choose between us and his people. We've done that enough times in the past."

"What about staying until everything cools down?" Cassie suggested. "You could probably get out of here without much trouble in six months or so."

Marco shook his head. "I can't. I've got– well, you know."

Rachel raised her eyebrows. "What do we know? I'm kind of out of the loop, remember?"

"Not you, Cassie," Marco replied.

"Oh, do share," Rachel said, leaning towards Cassie with a conspiratorial look on her face.

"Sorry," Cassie said. "I did tell Marco I'd keep this between us."

"Suffice to say," Marco explained, "that there is a lady back home I would rather not keep waiting."

I thought Rachel's eyebrows would vanish past her pale blonde hairline. "You mean to tell me that you finally found someone willing to date you?" Her voice was tinged with incredulous delight. "Oh, man, is she famous? Have I heard of her? _Exactly_ how blind is she?"

Marco shoved her playfully. I flapped to keep my balance on her arm. "That's all you're going to find out, so don't bother asking," he said.

Jake cleared his throat. "If we could get back to business?"

"Sorry."

"Sorry."

"So we haven't got a decent plan for Marco yet except the ship one," Jake said, sitting on a crate. "Let's come back to that. Cassie, what do we do about you?"

"I should be okay," Cassie said. "They might arrest me, but the Hork-Bajir prefer dealing with me and there actually isn't much staff in my office. I'll be back to work within a week, on probation."

"Good. That's one problem taken care of." Jake ran his hand through his hair. "Rachel, you're going to go live with your family?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't decided yet whether I should tell them or just let them get on with their lives. They mourned me already, you know? It's in the past for them."

"Your choice," Jake said, but his eyes darkened. He clearly didn't approve, but he wasn't going to waste time arguing about it. "Where will you stay, then?"

‹I had a thought about that,› I said. I'd been thinking about it the entire way back to the barn and this was the best idea I'd come up with. ‹What if she stayed with my mother?›

"Would Loren take her in?" Jake asked.

‹Probably,› I said. ‹If we explained the situation I don't think she'd turn Rachel away.›

"Okay." Jake rubbed his hands together. "Marco, got any bright ideas about your problem?"

"I better get used to hiding around crates," Marco replied glumly.

"All right. Tobias, could you help him out with getting on board the ship?"

I raised a wing in salute. ‹Yessir.›

"Excellent." He rose and headed towards the barn door. "I'm going to go turn myself in. You all take care of yourselves."

Marco rolled his eyes. "Oh, Jake. Always so noble." He grabbed Jake's arm. "You're coming with _me_, my friend. You've spent more than enough time in military prison."

Jake jerked his arm but couldn't quite escape Marco's grasp. "Let me go, man. This is something I need to do..." He trailed off and his eyes lost their focus.

Marco looked at us sheepishly and shrugged. "Sorry. I had to stop him somehow." He turned back to Jake. "Hey, Jake. Morph flea and hop on Tobias." Jake obediently began to morph.

Twenty minutes later, I was flying over the docks with Marco, who was in seagull morph. Jake had been grumbling since the acquiring trance had worn off about ten minutes prior.

‹Look, Jake,› I insisted. ‹This is for your own good. You never let yourself be happy anymore. You've punished yourself enough for the war. Now enjoy the spoils.›

‹Whatever.› His tone was petulant, but he stopped complaining after that.

‹Do you guys have morphs that would fit in on a cargo ship?›

‹Not really,› Marco admitted. ‹I was thinking rat, though.›

If I'd had a mouth at the time, I would have smiled. ‹That's a specialty of mine.›

Another ten minutes later and I'd guided two rats safely onto a ship headed for Indonesia. From there, Marco assured me, he and Jake would easily be able to get back to his home country.

‹Good luck,› I called to them. I wheeled around and headed back towards the outskirts of town. Rachel was waiting, and this time I wouldn't let her down.


	18. Epilogue

THE SALVATION

RACHEL

Tobias and I lay in his meadow, staring up at the fluffy white clouds in the beautiful blue sky. Both of us were in our original bodies – some trick of the Observer's method of giving me back my morphs had also given me the ability to morph into myself. Now I finally understood the dilemma Tobias used to face every time we were together. I could become myself again, at the expense of losing my ability to morph. I wasn't sure that was something I could bring myself to give up.

Oh well. I had my whole lifetime to decide.

For the moment, though, it was Rachel and Tobias, lying together on a bright sunny day, hands intertwined, hearts beating together. Our relationship had always been strange, but now it was going to be even stranger. But I knew that we could weather it, because we always had. Our love was stronger than our circumstances. It was stronger than death itself.

We would endure.

Together.

* * *

_I want to thank everybody who's read this fic and supported me over the nearly three years it's taken me to finally get it all out. I especially want to thank those of you who have reviewed: __Live4percabeth, FashionDiva7, Rai, animorphlover 37, james is my boi, Mimi-dudette, someone, Atlastme, mangaluver34, Firestar178, just me, elektra30, Panther Moon, Andrew Fisher15, ForgetfulChild, Avatar of Wurms, DecidingBetweenJazzAndAlice, hotpinkfleur, tobiasismine, Annoysomeness 101, Lubeck07, ChibiRaccoon, Ember Nickel, YellinYee, Sarah1281, Rachel, and the nameless reveiwer from April 17. Thank you so much._

_I've also finished editing the older chapters, so if you want to see how the story would've been if I'd had any idea where it was going when I started it, go ahead and give it a reread._

_Oh, and since it's a frequently asked question, I'm not using the same thought-speech brackets as KAA uses in the books. They're actually called angular single quotes, and they can be typed on your average QWERTY keyboard by holding ALT and using the keypad to type 0139 and 0155._

_Keep an eye on my account, because I've got a story coming soon that's set a couple years before this one._

_See you next time!_


End file.
